The importance of monitoring your website
The importance of monitoring your website
Are you monitoring your website? You should be, especially if
you are using it to make some extra cash, and definitely if it
is your only source of income.
You need to monitor your website to protect it from so many
nasties which could affect your bottom line. Any of the
following could bring your site to a close.
A hack attack. If your website is hacked, it could be used for
any number of illegal activities. A hacker could use your
hosting account to send uce (Spam) from your domain or even add
web pages such as user information "phishing" sites. These sites
will have a page which looks like a login page for Paypal, Ebay
or any bank. If someone fills in the form their details are sent
to the hacker who now has access to their account. Your website
will be shut down, and you lose money while you sort out the
mess. If you have any user information stored on your websites
server, a hacker may also gain access to that too, and personal
information is a very easy commodity to sell on.
Keep an eye on your site for any unexpected activity or unusual
stats showing for pages you didn't make yourself. Most accounts
have some kind of statistics built in to the control panel so it
shouldn't cost too much to monitor visits and hits, and to which
pages they go. Make sure any scripts you use are secure and
updated with any patches to keep the hackers out too.
Hosting or server problems. Your host, or server may have a
problem, and lose access to the internet, or crash taking all
sites hosted there down with them. This gives you two potential
headaches, firstly loss of business while it is offline, but
more importantly you may lose data. Making sure you take regular
backups of all databases, and all your sites pages will help,
also monitoring how often any outages occur, and how long each
lasts will tell you whether it's time to change hosts.
No host can guarantee with absolute certainty 100% uptime, but
some are much more prone to downtime than others. If you have
all the site information backed up, moving hosts isn't as much
of a task as it used to be, and can be done in quite a short
time if needed. As hosting is such a cut throat business,
finding a new one is also relatively simple. There are even
software programs which will alert you if your site is
unavailable.
Blog and Forum spamming With the all pervasive spread of
blogging it was inevitable that some people would resort to
spamming them. Forums and message boards are also open to abuse
from software which will autopost to thousands of sites in
minutes. If your blog is able to accept comments, it is wise to
ask for some kind of registration from people who wish to make
comments. If you don't ask for registration you leave your blog
open to blatant advertising done by software, which will be
unlikely to bear any relevance to your blogs subject. This goes
for your forums too, allowing guests to post without
registration is open to abuse by widely available software which
autoposts inane comments with a signature which contains a url
to the spammers product.
Asking for registration will help ensure that only people
committed to posting something relevant get to add their
comments or posts. If someone wants to post they will take the
time to register.
It may take a little time, but monitoring your websites could
save you from a lot more wasted time in the future. Backups of
your site will help and should be taken at least weekly, and all
your scripts should at least have security updates as soon as
they are released.
It's your site, make sure it stays in your control.